The Comedy Writer (7 page)

When I got home, I felt tremendously creepy, like a stalker or something. I lay on my bed, stared at the ceiling. I worried what everyone must be saying back in Boston. I pictured the guys at U.S. Lines picking up their bonuses and gossiping about me. Hear about Halloran? He's nuts, he's lost it, he's delusional, he thinks he's fucking
Hemingway!
They weren't supposed to know about my writing, but I feared that word had leaked. And what must my parents be thinking? I thought of Amanda, about how good she must be feeling about her decision. A couple beers later I was really wallowing in it, and to make things worse I found a good bra ad, spread it out on the floor, then hung my head off the bed and fucked my pillow missionary-style, all of which wouldn't normally bother me, except it
was four in the afternoon and I was in a crummy little apartment and there were newspapers and soiled socks and underwear on the floor, and I didn't have a real job and I didn't have a girlfriend and I was thirty-three years old and I could hear the world passing me by outside and nothing in the universe seemed to be going my way.

I fell asleep and the phone woke me up. It was a man from the
Los Angeles Times
and he said they were going to publish my story.

and hackeysack and cook-outs on the beach. She loved her parents and visited them each Sunday, and girls liked her as much as guys. She was a Big Sister to a fifteen-year-old autistic kid. She rode her bike everywhere in the summer and had frizzy brown hair and soft blue eyes. She was shy around strangers and hardly ever wore makeup and she had a great body, and she laughed when someone suggested she model and everyone's mother loved her. But she was no priss. She could run like a guy, drink beer like one, too. She was sweet, but wouldn't let herself be pushed around. She fucked like a porn star.

The night I met Amanda I was on mushrooms. I'd eaten them for old times' sake with my former college friends and the six of us ended up at a Boston College mixer following a football game. We were all out of our minds and stuck in the middle of a throng of people when I turned around for what seemed an instant but was probably twenty minutes and suddenly all my stoner friends were gone. I began to panic and hyperventilate, and then I saw a hip-pieish woman in a hippieish skirt and I grabbed her arm.

“Have you ever tripped?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I'm doing mushrooms right now and I lost my friends and I need you to get me out of here.”

Amanda pulled me through the crowd and calmed my nerves outside and when my buzz had peaked and I knew I wasn't going to get any higher, I started loosening up. She was twenty-three years old and worked for Shearson/Lehman Brothers; I was a twenty-seven-year-old salesman. I knew immediately what I'd stumbled upon and wanted badly to win her over. I'd seen her before, several times, in the Back Bay, at the Dockside, bopping around Faneuil Hall, rushing along Milk Street. She stood out.

That started a five-year run, and it didn't end until the hippie Lehman Brothers girl looked like a woman and she started playing hackeysack with my heart. She kicked it around for a few months, then stuffed it in the back pocket of her jeans and sat on it for a while. She threw the jeans in the wash and tumble-dried them on high. She put a hot iron to them, then gave them away to the Salvation Army.

Despite all this, I still loved her and when I got the good news about my story being published, I felt elated, I was a real writer, and I glanced at the phone and a few seconds later I had her roommate on the line.

Maura was kind, if a tad distant, and she quickly put Amanda on. Amanda said she was eating dinner. I apologized, but didn't let her off that easy. It had taken me three months to make this call. I told her I was in L.A. now. She said she knew, asked if it was true that I was writing. I stumbled for a second, then confessed it was true, said it was a longshot, but I was going to play it out for a while. Better now than in ten years, I said. If it didn't work out, I'd come home. No big deal. The conversation started getting more strained, so I got to the point.

“Why don't you come out and visit?” I said.

“Henry …”

“What?”

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not.”

“Look, it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, nothing's going to happen. You can just come and see California.”

“I don't think so.”

“But you'd love it out here, it's Beach Blanket Bingo. And just because we're broken up doesn't mean we can't still be friends.”

“I can't.”

“Why can't you?”

“Because … because it wouldn't be fair to you.”

“Then don't be fair to me. Come and abuse the hell out of me. You can get even.”

I wanted a laugh but didn't get one.

“We'll just be buddies.”

“I don't know, Henry … No.”

We always came back to this. And then I felt the anger.

“Is that the only word in your vocabulary now? What are you, a two-year-old? I mean, you just find it so easy to say no to me.”

“You made it that way.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? How did I make it that way?

“I'm going to hang up now.”

“Answer my question first. What the hell did I do?”

“Henry, we've been through this a hundred times.”

“And I still don't know the answer!”

“You make me say no to you because that's the only answer to the question you're asking.”

I sighed and in a whiny voice said, “But why can't you just say yes sometimes?”

“Because I can't. Now this isn't going anywhere, so I'm going to hang up.”

“Wait. Don't.”

I wracked my brain for the sentence that would save us, but it didn't exist. I'd told her I'd change, I'd told her I'd do anything she wanted, I'd told her I loved her until the words didn't mean anything anymore. All it did was humiliate me and destroy any pleasant memories we may have had. I couldn't think of us the way we used to be, because we didn't exist that way anymore. The memories were fraudulent. If you're a Red Sox fan, you can't think about Game Six of the '86 Series and say, “Wasn't that great! The Sox led for almost the whole game!” No, the lead meant nothing. If it ends bad, it's bad, and that's all that matters.

“Why don't you think it over,” I said, “and I'll call you back next week. You can bring Manra or your sister or someone, so it won't be just the two of us.”

I could imagine her rolling her eyes at Maura. It didn't matter, though. My pride was gone.

“I'll call you next week,” I said.

“I can't come.”

I started to sweat. It was like trying to wriggle free from a hangman's noose. “Why not? You still haven't given me one good reason.”

“Because it would be getting your hopes up, okay?”

A spiked wall at a hundred miles an hour. The final blow. I
hated her for doing it and I wanted to let her know. I wanted to bomb her, to attack from all sides, but it would be a suicide mission, I knew. All I could do was hang up. Extra-hard. It made a big noise in my apartment, but to her it probably sounded like a little click.

was the opening jingle to ESPN's
SportsCenter.
When I heard it, I knew I had at least a half hour of peace ahead of me. As I stared at the day's highlights and results, everything else was forgotten. Likewise, the thing that got me out of bed in the morning was the thought of staring at the sports page while sipping my coffee. I loved to see how the underdogs had made out. Guys like Jim Eisenreich, still playing despite being nuts; Jim Abbott, the Angels' one-armed hurler; and Dickie Thon, the All-Star who'd been beaned in the prime of his career and was now hanging on by a thread. Sometimes I skipped the stories, just checked out the stats. My favorite player was Wade Boggs. He wasn't an underdog, but he was the most reliable and he played for the Sox. Win or lose, something about seeing that Boggsie had
banged out two or three hits made my day. It was a fact and it was right there in black and white and this was somehow comforting.

Sunday was the best day for stats, but this Sunday, it wasn't the sports section I was thinking about when I went down to the market. It was the first Sunday in May and the
L.A. Times Magazine
was publishing my story today. A desperate-sounding editor named Arnold Sternberg had been the one to call. A piece had fallen through, they needed something quick, Julia Frick's assistant had shown him mine. I had mixed feelings. It was nice to finally be a published writer, even if it wasn't exactly accurate. At least I'd gotten part of the truth out. That was good, I supposed. It would be called
The jumper.

Back home I put lima beans on a soft tortilla, melted cheese on it, and took it out on the front steps with the paper, a cup of coffee, and a glass of ice water. I read the sports section, the calendar section, and the front section, and then there was only one thing left. It was making me sick thinking about it. But what happened wasn't my fault, I told myself, any reasonable person would have done the same. I heard a bell and watched an ice cream truck pull up across the street. A half dozen little ones came running with their dollar bills. No adults followed, no one stood in doorways and watched. I thought how odd it was that parents would check out babysitters, investigate preschools, glare at their own neighbors, but when that ice cream man came ringing, they set the kids loose as if they were going out to meet Christ himself. Where did the ice cream man come from? Who made his slushes? What was his name, his background, his intentions? From my angle I couldn't see the man, but I caught a glimpse as he hopped back in the front seat and drove off to who knew where.

I stared at the cover of the magazine section, a big red sickle, an article about the new Russia. It seemed so prestigious, so worldly— my name in a magazine that published stories about Russia! It would have been wonderful if I hadn't recorded the last three minutes of a person's life inaccurately.

I threw the papers in the trash and headed out to the driving range. The traffic was heavy and I checked out all the good-looking drivers in their shiny vehicles. The people were definitely better-looking out here, the girls at least. They blew those Bicnags—Bos-ton-Irish-Catholic-No-Action-Girls—out of the water.

As I took the corner onto Beverly, a cute redhead with a big smile sped around me singing to herself. A happy woman, it had been so long! What I wouldn't give to meet a happy woman. I sped up to her. Briefly I considered ramming her Jeep, taking full blame, getting her phone number. I pulled my Arrow up on her right at a stop light. When the Happy Redhead caught me looking, she didn't blanch, just started singing louder, bobbing her head more. She checked out the cellular geek in the Lexus to her left. He was talking animatedly on his car phone, wearing tennis clothes, probably making a deal on a weekend read. When she glanced back at me, I was talking animatedly into my shoe, Bond-like. The Happy Redhead laughed, so I covered the heel and called over to her, “This is a remarkable coincidence. Here I am sitting in a car, and there
you
are sitting in a car. Let's go on a date!”

She nodded her head. I couldn't tell if it was to me or the music.

“Seriously,” I said. “I know this is a little bold, but how about we go get some eggs?”

Well, of course eggs should never be included in pickup lines, and that was the last I ever saw of her.

The phone was ringing when I got home. I answered and a man said, “That was really stupid, Halloran.”

Immediately I felt guilty. “Who's this?”

“Levine.”

“Who?”

“Adam Levine.”

It rang a bell.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I, uh—”

“Aren't you Bob's son?”

“Huh?”

“Last week when you conned your way into Hal Markey's office—I was the other guy.”

“Oh …”

A tidal wave of embarrassment.

“Nice try,” he said.

“Eh.”

“Very stupid, but a nice try. Do you know why it was stupid?”

“Um … because it didn't work?”

“Do you know why it didn't work?

“Well …”